By confining ourselves as a community to reading C. S. Lewis and Flannery O’Connor, extolling T. S. Eliot, and searching for works with Christian messages, we will neglect the bounty of good works and the variety of ways that literature can benefit us.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin call on Christian scholars to expand their reading horizons. In this new year, I want to expand my own horizons by simply getting to know my own period of specialization better. When I look at the works I’ve written about for the Conference on Christianity and Literature (which has featured quite a few papers on Lewis and O’Connor), I can only find one from my area: King Lear. This shouldn’t be the case.
I’ve just finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? and one central thrust of her book is that we should read the Puritans. She argues that we have dismissed a rich heritage because of our prejudices against what Puritans were supposedly like. If we read them wisely, we would find advocates for the kind of liberties we hold dear. This may be where I begin. Yes, I will reacquaint myself with the normal PhD-comp-exam-type works from my area, but I also want to find the poetry, prose, and drama that I missed the first time around.
The literature of the Early Modern Period is God’s plenty. I hope to harvest more of it in 2019.